After forcing myself out of bed with feeling soo ill in Abel Tasman, I somehow got on the coach for a 9 hour journey. Today was a bit of a blur and a right off. We were basically staying in a mining and brewing town called Greymouth as a pit stop down the coast (really a rest for the driver). It was a horrible hostel, painted in very bright colours, probably to make it look less grey. Tonight I missed out on a visit to Monteith's brewery, it sounded like a lot ...

A 6am start from Wellington to catch the Bluebridge ferry across to Picton on the south island. We were on the ferry for 3 hours, then at Picton picked up 20 more interesting characters to fill our coach, I thought I wanted more people, but actually most of the people we picked up seemed just as unfriendly as the first bunch. We stopped on our way to Abel Tasman at a winery and tasted lots of fine NZ wines. This was the Malborough region and thier Sauvignon Blan...

Off to Wellington today...a longish drive, but beautiful weather. Stopped at a town on the way down called Bulls, not much going on there, but it was quite interesting how they used the name of the town in everything. Bank-a-bull, a bakery called Ed-i-bull, Pharmacy called Cure-a-bull...you get the picture. Wellington is a great city, can see why people would live here. At this point on the trip our original group of 30 had dwindled down to only six of us going ...

We spent the next couple of nights in the middle of the nowhere!! The first night we spent at a place called Blue Duck Lodge, which is an environmentally leading conservation farm. The road leading to it was 45km of very narrow dust tracks with a huge drop on one side. Salty our crazy driver was speeding around all the bends...eeeek!! We walked to a waterfall within the 9000 acres of the farmland. Some of the girls on our tour went goat hunting today and brought...

We wandered round the town of Rotorua today, not much going on unless you are doing mountain biking or white water rafting, but was trying not to spend pennies today. It was a very rainy day, but this didn't stop us putting our bikini's on and jumping into one of the natural hot springs. This was created by the amount of thermal activity in the area, a bit eery actually, but very nice indeed. We also saw a thermal mud pool, too hot to actually sit in, the mud was...